Parents and school involvement
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| Thu, 08-23-2007 - 8:49am |
My question stems from a personal experience. My middle child is starting kindergarten next week. I've become fairly close with one of my dd's friend's moms- this is her first child entering the school system. She WOH, I do not, plus I have experience with the school, so she's been calling me with questions and comments.
It started to go bad when she called to complain that the kindy orientation is during the day- when she is working. Then it led to complaints about the parents' read aloud program (when the kids are in library) and other opportunities for volunteerism in the school. I get that these things aren't convenient for her, but I'm getting annoyed with the complaining. How can the kids have an orientation at night when they go to school during the day? None of these events are mandatory for parents or kids. And plenty of activities are scheduled for evenings: Back to school night, the PTA picnic, etc.
She thinks because she can't participate, no one should be able to, apparently. Plenty of WOHP do show up for these things. I think she's being unrealistic if she thought she could put a couple of kids through school without ever taking a vacation day. Am I wrong? Am I missing something here?

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mmmm...wonder how you USED to be or still are????????????????
Don't be jealous that Long Island is a nice place to live with good schools.
Did I say it works all the time? Or are you just expounding upon what I said?
I would NEVER deal with an abusive boss long-term. Not only do I deserve better, but staying only validates their abuse and makes them think they can do it forever. No job is worth abuse.
But it does make me thankful everyday that I have one of the best bosses in the world.
Niether. Dd was falling behind academically a little each year. Because she made progress year over year the school tried to dupe me into believing she was doing fine. The school was ignoring the fact she was not making as much progress as she should have been each year. If a child only progresses 80% of a year each year, they fall one year behind every 5 years even though you see constant progress. This is what was happeneing to dd. I now understand how kids get to high school and can't read (dd's reading would have topped out at a 5th or 6th grade level because of the specific reading issue she had). The school said they were doing ok and mom and dad saw that 80% improvement each year not realizing their child was really falling 20% of a year farther behind each year.
Dd was headed for a situation where the peers I would prefer for her would have rejected her because she couldn't perform at their level. Peers are VERY important in determining where a child performs. Knowing that I knew I had to do something to fix the situation. We tried for two years to fix it with outside tutoring but they spent so much time unconfusing her on the many spiraling methods of Everyday Mathematics that that proved costly and not nearly as effective as we would have liked so we switched schools.
I believe we made the right choice. Dd not only caught up to her peers in the new school but surpassed them (hard to explain but all the kids were in one class and broke into groups with some being G&T and some not. Dd seems to have been inspired by the G&T crowd even though she was grouped with the standard track kids and came in a year behind.). She struggled establishing a new peer group her first year only to be placed in the gifted track her second year (which became a completely separate track that year) and have to start over. The other kids on the G&T track have been on it since 1st grade. Dd being a newcomer was met with skepticism by her new peers as to whether or not she belonged.
The way this school works, G&T mainstreams after 6th grade. Knowing that, we just weathered last year. She is now in classes with both her peers from the G&T track and the ones she hooked up with the first year in this school. I have my fingers crossed that she'll end this year with a strong positive peer group made up of kids from both tracks because now there are no tracks (now they just have different expectations for each student based on past performance and authentic testing which is performed three times a year. Authentic testing, for those who don't know, is testing for the purpose of determining how the child is learning as opposed to testing for grades. Parents usually don't see these test results. I have for dd#2 because of the decision to double promote her but never have for dd#1. Her placment in the G&T track came as a surprise. We didn't know she'd been moved to that room until we showed up for school on the first day of school last year. Her last round of testing the previous year resulted in the track switch.).
I know in my dd's school, they have a Gate program for children who are surpasses others. They have the resources for them so they don't just fall through the cracks and not use all their abilities. There is also resources for children who need more help than the normal classroom environment.
Good move especially if your private school is small. Middle school is really a bad educational idea. Kids do better in smaller enviromnents (and K-8 schools) in this age group (actually any but particularly this one).
I forget who said this but it came up in my adolecent psych class that adolesence is the worst time to try and teach anyone anything. I agree. And here we are taking hormonally challenged children and herding them into huge schools, where we're bringing in kids from multiple schools and creating a whole new school environment and can't even deal with them on an individual basis. Who thought this was a good idea?
My dd is in a K-8 school. Her class is grades 7 and 8. They have two main teachers then an art, music and gym teacher. The two main teachers teach math, science, social science and language arts. They will have the same teachers for two years. There are about 70 kids in this combined class in a school of about 400.
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